Endless materials: alqem raises €8M to scale its AI-driven Materials Discovery Engine, built on the largest known materials database
Munich, Germany, July 6, 2026 – alqem, a DeepTech startup building an AI-driven engine to discover and commercialize next-generation materials, has raised €8 million in pre-seed funding co-led by UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures. The startup was founded by the team behind Alexandria – the world's leading open materials database, used by thousands of researchers and companies at the frontier of AI-driven materials discovery.
alqem is building its discovery engine on two proprietary foundations: a database of predicted materials vastly larger than anything previously available to the field, and high-quality training datasets for material properties that did not exist before. To close the loop between prediction and experiment, the company also brings in-house synthesis capability.
Undiscovered materials powering the next technological era
Bronze, iron, steel, silicon: every major technological era has been defined by a material breakthrough. Yet only a small fraction of theoretically possible crystalline compounds have ever been synthesized. Hundreds of millions of possibilities remain undiscovered. At the same time, the materials we rely on are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Advanced permanent magnets – critical to electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, and defense systems – are roughly 90% produced in China, and recent export restrictions have turned materials supply into a geopolitical flashpoint.
"For the first time, we have a map of the materials universe. Not just a few known compounds, but hundreds of millions of possibilities we can now systematically explore and bring to the world. Materials that could make electric vehicles more energy efficient, wind turbines more powerful, and critical supply chains independent from single-country control," says Dr. Hanh Nguyen, CEO, alqem.
The last breakthrough in permanent magnets came more than 40 years ago!
The search for new materials is no longer an odyssey. It is a directed journey. alqem's mission is to compress the path from scientific prediction to industrial application from decades to years. Or even months. The discovery engine has already produced a pipeline of rare-earth-free magnet candidates, with predicted performance validated against experimental data. By narrowing hundreds of millions of possibilities down to a tractable shortlist and automating experimental data analysis steps that typically take hours, the engine gets more accurate with every iteration.
"We start where the need is greatest – rare-earth-free magnets, a material the world urgently needs and hasn't been able to replace for decades. But the engine we are building is not limited to one material class," says Dr. Nguyen.
Beyond the discovery engine, alqem is working to establish a European-led supply chain for materials. This work supports the build-out of DeepTech research, engineering, and manufacturing jobs across its Munich and Coimbra operations.
From Alexandria to alqem: Scientific excellence and technology
Three technical foundations underpin the discovery engine. The first is al-mine: a proprietary database of predicted stable crystalline compounds, deliberately weighted away from rare-earth, toxic, and costly elements. The second is al-oracle: a set of high-quality, domain-specific training datasets for material properties, assembled by the team over the years. Both build on Alexandria, the open materials database co-built by alqem co-founder Dr. Tiago Cerqueira (CTO) and scientific advisor Prof. Miguel Marques – proof that this team has been defining the scientific standard in this field long before alqem existed. The third foundation is in-house synthesis and characterization capability, anchored by co-founder Prof. Milan Allan, Chair of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich.
Collaborations and supporters
alqem's work is supported by a close collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden on next-generation magnetic materials. The collaboration is led by Prof. Claudia Felser, Director of the Institute and Vice President of the Max Planck Society. She serves as scientific advisor to alqem alongside Prof. Miguel Marques (Ruhr University Bochum) and Michael Viertler, former Senior Partner and Managing Partner Munich at McKinsey. Research partners include LMU Munich, TU Munich, Técnico Lisbon, University of Porto, and the University of Coimbra.
“alqem is a startup with world-class science translated into a company tackling one of Europe's most strategic industrial challenges. Advanced materials sit at the heart of the technologies that will define the next decades – from clean energy to mobility to defense. alqem has the unique scientific foundation with the entrepreneurial drive to build a category leader in this field,” says Amanda Birkenholz, Principal, UVC Partners.
“At USV we have a thesis around AI learning loops for the real world that create proprietary datasets. The alqem.ai team is leveraging their experience with building one of the largest open data sets to now explore innovative materials, starting with magnets. We are excited about their approach,” says Albert Wenger, Partner, Union Square Ventures.
“Discovering a genuinely new permanent magnet is one of the hardest problems in materials science. The last real breakthrough came more than forty years ago. What makes alqem's approach different is that it doesn't stop at prediction. In our collaboration, we are putting exactly the kind of rare-earth-free candidates the field has been waiting for to the experimental test, and it is the pairing of large-scale computational screening with rigorous synthesis that convinces me this can work," says Prof. Claudia Felser, Director, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids, and Vice President of the Max Planck Society.
About alqem team members:
alqem was founded in 2026 by Dr. Hanh Nguyen (CEO), a chemicals and energy executive with 15+ years across McKinsey, Unilever, and OCI Global, where she led billion-euro clean energy and sustainability programs; Dr. Tiago Cerqueira (CTO), who co-developed Alexandria; and Prof. Milan Allan (CSO), Chair of Experimental Physics – Quantum Metrology and Sensing at LMU Munich.
alqem plans to grow its team across its Munich and Coimbra and is part of the UnternehmerTUM ecosystem.
About alqem
alqem is a deep-tech startup using physics-informed AI and lab-based synthesis to discover next-generation materials. Founded in 2026 and based in Munich, Germany and Coimbra, Portugal, the company combines the world's largest known database of predicted materials with proprietary training data and in-house synthesis to discover and commercialize the next generation of breakthrough materials.
For more information, visit alqem.ai
About Union Square Ventures
For more than twenty years, Union Square Ventures (USV) has invested across a wide range of technology sectors, including social, marketplaces, developer tools, education, healthcare, fintech, decentralized systems, energy, and AI. Rather than focusing on a single category, we look for opportunities where technology and broader societal shifts are creating new possibilities. We are often drawn to markets undergoing significant change and to founders pursuing ideas that may not yet be obvious. USV is a small partnership based in New York. Since 2003, we have managed over $1 billion across our funds and have invested in companies including Twitter, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Duolingo, Etsy, MongoDB, and Stripe.
For more information, visit usv.com
About UVC Partners
UVC Partners backs Europe’s most ambitious B2B tech founders building new category leaders. From DeepTech to AI, the firm has invested in breakout startups including Isar Aerospace, Proxima Fusion, Q.ANT, Aleph Alpha, Tacto, Flix, and FINN.
With more than €700 million in assets under management, UVC Partners invests up to €10 million initially across multiple stages from early to growth. Over the lifetime of the investment, €30 million per company can be deployed.
Beyond capital, UVC Partners' investment team is a "tech team for tech teams" – supporting founders in building and scaling market-leading companies. Through its unique access to UnternehmerTUM – Europe's leading innovation hub – the VC offers a powerful ecosystem of entrepreneurs, key corporate decision-makers, and top-tier researchers. UVC Partners' value-creation team provides direct access to a network of 1,000+ companies – potential customers and strategic partners.
For more information, visit www.uvcpartners.com.
